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The 2000 Elections: What's At Stake
White House Committed to "Strong Progress"
View From Captial Hill: Kyoto Is Not The Answer
The Presidential Candidates Sound Off
Americans Support Strong Action On Warming
Debating The Effects On Agriculture
Does Climate Change Cause More Extreme Weather
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"Learning to Shop for Utilities" with Martha Hamilton. Online Discussion
NEI Viewpoint Discussion on Global Climate Change with Maureen T. Koetz
By Roger Ballentine and Frank E. Loy
(Ballentine is Deputy Assistant to the President for Environmental Initiatives and White House Climate Change Coordinator. Loy is Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs and head of the U.S. delegation to this week's climate meetings in Bonn, Germany.)
A few weeks ago, more than 500 mayors and local officials--from Baltimore to St. Louis to Seattle--took a pledge. They committed themselves, and their cities, to the fight against global warming. Two weeks earlier, DuPont pledged to dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, joining Motorola, Dow, IBM, BP Amoco and other leading corporations taking real action on climate change. From city council chambers to corporate boardrooms, America is mobilizing against global warming--the greatest environmental challenge of the Twenty-first Century.
That is the message U.S. representatives will take to Germany this week when 160 nations gather for this year's round of international climate negotiations. Our objective in Bonn will be to ensure that the international community continues to make strong progress in elaborating a system that fights global warming in an intelligent way and at a cost that is reasonable, with strong efforts by developed and developing countries alike.
No More Business As Usual Continuing on a "business as usual" course will lead to further warming in the next century--as much as 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit, according to leading scientists. The recent drought in the eastern United States, and the torrential rains and flooding that followed, offer a too-exciting preview of the kind of extreme weather this warming could bring.
To help protect future generations from these grave risks, the United States is moving aggressively to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, President Clinton and Vice President Gore secured over $1 billion towards accelerating the deployment of Twenty-first Century clean energy technologies.
So far this year, President Clinton has signed two new executive orders to address global warming. One will dramatically reduce the federal government's energy use, saving taxpayers $750 million a year. The second aims to support the growth of the U.S. bioenergy industry, which makes fuels and products from crops and agricultural wastes, creating new income for farmers and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by up to 100 million tons.
Our Agenda in Bonn On cost, the United States will continue to insist that nations must be free to make full use of the Kyoto Protocol's flexible, market-based mechanisms, such as emissions trading. Limiting this ability (as some nations have proposed) would only make reducing greenhouse gases more expensive for everyone, with no gain to the environment. Similarly, nations must be allowed to receive credit for appropriate forestry and land-use practices that sequester greenhouse gases. These activities reduce the cost of mitigating climate change, and create valuable opportunities for American farmers.
The United States also will continue to insist that a global challenge like climate change be met with a global solution. We fully support efforts by developing countries to grow their economies. We also firmly believe that countries can pursue this goal without repeating the wasteful and polluting mistakes of the past century. We applaud nations, such as Argentina, that have announced their intent to voluntarily adopt emissions targets. And we are committed to creating sustainable development opportunities through Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism (which gives industrialized countries an incentive to undertake clean energy projects in developing countries) and through other economic, technical and financial partnerships.
Steady, Solid Progress Needed Whatever the outcome in Bonn, we must continue stepping up our efforts at home as well. Even as local leaders, major corporations and ordinary citizens join the fight against global warming, naysayers in Congress are trying to block the way. Ignoring the mounting evidence of climate change, they want to slash funding for clean energy programs and load up budget bills with special-interest "riders" that aim to strangle common-sense efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
As the people of America, and the nations of the world, commit themselves to meeting the most profound environmental challenge ever, the U.S. Congress must not doom these efforts. There is too much at stake.
The Bonn conference takes place against the backdrop of a broad and growing scientific consensus that human activities have started to affect the global climate. New studies of Northern Hemisphere temperatures show that the Twentieth Century has been the warmest in the past 1,000 years, that the 1990s have been the warmest decade in that period, and that 1998 was the single warmest year ever recorded (breaking the old mark set just a year earlier).
In Bonn, we want to work with other nations to shape a solution to the challenge of climate change--one that promotes economic growth and sustainable development around the globe. Two years ago in Kyoto, Japan, nations put in place the architecture of an international strategy to address the challenge of climate change. The United States is fully committed to completing the work begun in Kyoto, where more than 160 countries agreed under the Kyoto Protocol to take action to mitigate climate change. At the Bonn meeting and in the months ahead, we look forward to addressing the critical issues of cost and developing country participation so that the treaty can be ratified. But much remains to be done.
Bonn will not be a place for dramatic breakthroughs on these issues. But we do hope to achieve the kind of steady, solid progress that is necessary to keep the Kyoto process on track. If we fail to move forward--both in Bonn and beyond--we risk missing an important opportunity to protect our climate for generations to come.